The Templar Legion

21

The children marched them through the jungle in perfect military order, the smallest taking point thirty or forty feet ahead, one on their left, one on their right and the fourth coming up behind, the too-large weapon held firmly at port arms, ready to cut them down at the slightest indication of resistance.

It was he who had relieved Peggy of her camera and now wore it across his chest, looking like a sort of fearsome tourist child waiting for Mowgli or Baloo to appear on the trail before him.

They walked without speaking and when they communicated it was through hand motions and whistles. Their attention was on their environment and their prisoners, their faces devoid of emotion, or perhaps, thought Holliday, they had no emotion left.

When he was ten his uncle had bought him a perfect replica of a Buntline Special, the Colt Peacemaker with the twelve-inch barrel that legend had it Wyatt Earp used. The enormous handgun must have looked ridiculous to any adult, but there was no sense of that with their four young jailers. The AK-47s seemed horribly normal being carried by these kids. The four children guarding them would commit cold-blooded murder without hesitation. The oldest couldn’t have been more than twelve.

They walked through the forest for an hour, and then two. At first Holliday thought they were heading for the distant trio of hills that seemed to struggle up out of the jungle but then they turned away. Coming over a small ridge he saw the river and between them and the water the smoking ruins of a village.

A few minutes later they reached the bottom of the rise and Holliday saw the first human remains, a human arm, male, sliced off close to the shoulder, marrow yellow where the bone had been crushed, blood in the dirt and sand congealing on the stump, the hand flexed as though clutching for a beggar’s offering that would never come. A few yards down the path was a head, split almost in two with the sweeping cut of a blade, taking off the head at the eyebrows and opening it like a softboiled egg.

Rafi threw up and Peggy began to cry silently. Strangely Eddie began to sing; the tune was familiar-“Auld Lang Syne”-but the words were different. Spanish, crooned like a lullaby, whispered so softly Holliday doubted that anyone else had heard.

Por que perder las esperanzas

de volverse a ver,

por que perder las esperanzas

si hay tanto querer.

The words must have had some fierce meaning for the Cuban, because his jaw was hard and Holliday could see the big sinus vein bulging across his forehead: as they continued along the path and into the smoking remains of the village there was more and more carnage-an infant that had been covered in gasoline and then thrown into a campfire, several male bodies staked out on the ground covered with hacking bloody cuts, several men, women and girls strung up from tree branches with piano wire that had almost decapitated them, the smell of blood and feces everywhere and above it all the sound of wailing children. Holliday could see them down at the riverbank. They were tied together in a row, about fifteen of them, the rope then attached to the stern of one of their big dugouts. A dozen older children, fourteen or fifteen years old, were waiting at their paddles, apparently for some signal.

Their four guards led the prisoners around the smoldering wreckage of a large hut, probably the common “longhouse” or dormitory for single men. Beyond it was a Russian UAZ Jeep knockoff in old-style jungle camo. Sitting on the hood of the vehicle was a dragonheaded man wearing a blue-and-orange New York Knicks jersey and old-fashioned black-and-white high-tops with a pair of worn green-on-green fatigues pushed into them. Holliday could see a very expensive-looking cobra tattoo in three colors on his right shoulder.

Beside him on the hood of the vehicle was a bloody machete. He had a holster around his waist and Holliday could see the handle of a.45 automatic peeking out. The dragon head looked as though it had been carved out of soft, light wood, the scales on the head alternately painted green and gold, the face red and the eyes yellow. The long curling tongue that stretched out over the bright ivory animal teeth was black. Holliday had never seen anything like it.

“My God!” Rafi whispered.

“What?” Holliday asked.

“It’s a figurehead; I swear it, a Norse figurehead.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, this guy is a descendant of our Viking pals back there?”

“It means it’s part of a cargo cult tradition,” said Rafi.

“You done your gabbin’ now?” said a voice from within the mask. The man sitting on the hood of the Russian Jeep took off the mask and set it down opposite the machete. The blood was beginning to dry a rusty brown. The buzzing of flies was everywhere.

“Where did you get the mask?” Rafi asked.

“Not that it be any your business little mama’s mang sal but I got it off the head of their witchie man. Right off his head!” The man in the Knicks jersey laughed. All his front teeth, top and bottom, were gold.

“Who are you?” Holliday asked.

“I am the man who holds your life in his hands, Nduku. The name my mother gave me was Jerimiah Salamango but I am now called Jerimiah Salamango of Christ, destroyer in His holy name. Rapist of temptress women in His holy name, deliverer of souls in His holy name, praise God! You understand this? I kill for my God as well as pray to Him on my knees five times each day. And this is the day that God hath made and we should rejoice in the shedding of blood for Him, praise God and hallelujah!”

“Why have you brought us here?” Holliday asked. The reek of the village was overpowering and the flies landing on him left sticky tracks on his skin.

“At first we saw your trail and then we saw the bodies of the men you killed and Jerimiah Salamango had curiosity about men who would take on a machine gun with spears and arrows. Then when my scouts reported back to me I thought I would make you my envoys, tells of Jerimiah’s story across the land to put fear in everyone and say that he was coming. In the end that is what Jerimiah Salamango has decided to do. When it was told to me that your woman had a picture camera it was even better, because you can get Jerimiah Salamango’s face on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. This camera makes video?”

“Yes,” said Peggy.

“Jerimiah thinks you are very lucky that you are the operator of the camera or you would have been fed to my lions, my very young lions.” He spread his hands, indicating the children around them. “My hungry lions.”

“You’re insane,” said Rafi.

“You could be dead in a very few moments if Jerimiah loses his temper.”

“Shut up, Rafi,” Peggy said.

Salamango slid off the hood of the car and walked down a narrow pathway to the river that had obviously once been the main street of the village. The boy carrying Peggy’s camera prodded them forward and they walked beside the man in the Knicks T-shirt through the smoldering lines of straw and mud huts and through the littered, shattered bodies and pieces of bodies.

“The trick is to make them kill their parents first. Beat their mothers’ brains in, slit their fathers’ throats, rape and then disembowel their sisters. Once they have done this for you to save their own lives they are yours, like property, like dogs. They will do anything for you and no order must need to make sense; it must only come from you like a man whistling for a dog that is his.”

Holliday began looking around for some kind of weapon, even a rock would do, estimating his odds of poking the man’s eyes out of his head or tearing out his tongue before he was swarmed and torn apart by his childish minions.

Only once or twice in his career-or in his life at all, for that matter-had he ever felt that sacrificing his life was a worthwhile and reasonable option; this was one of those times. To kill this man would be what Rafi called a mitzvah, an altogether good thing for the human race.

They reached the river. There were several fishing boats tied together, led by one of the outboard-powered dugouts the child soldiers had used to reach the river. In the fishing boats, crowded to the gunwales, were the rest of the people of the village, mostly old men, old women and very young children of both sexes. Everyone in the boats was wailing, screaming and crying. The smell of kerosene drifted over the river and Holliday knew what was going to happen. All around the boats Holliday could also see the cruising, scaly backs of swarms of crocodiles, waiting for the delivery of their prey. Waiting on the bank of the river were the rest of the jeering swarm of boy soldiers, gathered to watch the show.

“?El bastardo sadica!?Se va a quemar a continuacion, darles de comer a los cocodrilos!?Malos matar al puta madre!” Eddie muttered, furious, his dark eyes flashing with anger. His big fists clenched and the vein in his forehead was beating like a drum.

“Not if I kill him first,” said Holliday.

“With what?” Salamango laughed, overhearing them. “Do you know what those people out there in those boats said when we came into their village and began burning their houses and raping their daughters? They said that they were protected by the gods. They were protected by the umufo omhloshana; you know what that means?”

“The pale strangers,” said Eddie.

“That’s right, black man, Pale Strangers.” Salamango let out a huge rumble of laughter. “Well, my friends, you are the only pale strangers I see around here and I don’t see much protection going on.” He barked an order and the boy with Peggy’s camera came forward. Salamango gave another order and the boy reluctantly handed the camera over to Peggy and stepped back.

“You take the pictures when I tell you and you don’t stop until I tell you; understand, little white woman? Don’t start or stop before I tell you or I’ll rip you in half where you stand.” He grinned. “I want to make postcards to send to the United Nations.”

Rafi took a single lurching step forward but Holliday jammed his foot down painfully on the archaeologist’s instep. Peggy was crying now, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Why do you want to do this?” she asked. “Why?”

The man in the Knicks shirt stared down at her, lip curled. “I had a brother and his name was Felicianos and he was eight years old. They came into our village one night and killed almost everybody. They left Felicianos till the end and then they chopped off his orgao and threw it into the fire and then threw him in after it. They were FNLA, these people, Frente Nacional para a Libertacao de Angola, Portuguese with American arms, because America was afraid that Angola would become Marxist.”

“That was terrible, but no reason to do this,” pleaded Peggy.

“I do terrible things to show how terrible I am,” Salamango explained. “More terrible than the pigs who killed my brother by a thousand times. I do it for a million Felicianos.”

Eddie spit on the bloody ground. “You do it because you like it, cabron,” he said. “I know your type; I’ve smelled them before. They stink of their own anger and take it out on the world.”

“I’ll second that,” said Holliday.

Salamango sneered. “You people with your democracies and your communism, you don’t understand how the game is played here. Here, in my Africa, the leader is the man who is feared among his tribe and any other tribe; the man who is feared is the man who kills; and the man who is feared most and has the most power is the man who kills most. It has been that way for ten thousand years and it will be that way for another ten thousand or until we are all dead. That is Africa, little girl, and anyone who tells you other than that is white or a liar, and probably both.”

He turned and raised his fist. He called out a single word: “Kuf-wa!”

On the dugout the boy at the outboard tossed something into the nearest of the fishing boats. There was no immediate flame, just a heat ripple in the air that distorted the screaming figures on the first boat. The dugout set the fishing boats adrift and the first people, their clothes and flesh on fire, leaped over the side to be devoured by the waiting crocodiles. Within less than a minute the water around the flaming boats was a frothing red horror of blood and snapping bones.

And then it began.

The first dart, whether by accident or design, struck Salamango in the right eye, burying itself in the orb, leaving nothing outside the body except a narrow white cone of what appeared to be ordinary paper. The second dart struck him in the cheek, the long metal tip piercing from side to side with the cone on the left and the flattened diamond-shaped point coming out the other side. The points appeared to be coated with some sort of black, tarry substance.

Holliday turned on his heel and watched as all four of the armed children guarding them were also struck, each one more than once, the bright white cones appearing in faces, backs, chests and bellies.

The effects of the darts were instantaneous: paralysis, choking, convulsions, a strychnine-like arching of the back, foaming at the mouth and then complete loss of sphincter control followed almost immediately by death.

Holliday, Peggy, Rafi and Eddie were the only people left untouched. Out on the river, the dugout drifted. The boy who had torched the sailboats was draped over the gunwale as two crocodiles fought to pull his corpse into the water.

The sailboats themselves were smoldering hulks, their occupants either burned to death or dragged down to the muddy bottom by the giant reptiles. The whole thing had been silent and from the first dart in Salamango’s eye to the last child’s death had taken only seconds. Not a word had been said; not a shot had been fired.

With her camera Peggy began taking photos of the bizarre killing ground all around them. Suddenly she stopped; her hands were shaking too hard. Holliday followed her stunned gaze. Men began to appear from the jungle, scores of them, all dressed in ornately folded linen loincloths that looked like pleated kilts and sandals, their thongs crisscrossed up to the knee in a familiar design. They carried five- or six-foot-long bamboo tubes in their hands and short quivers on their belts for the long, cone-ended darts.

Some of the men wore crested wooden helmets with leather cheek flaps, the crests made from some kind of stiffened animal-hair bristle, while others wore simple linen coifs to match the kiltlike loincloths. The strangest thing about them was their color-a tanned light brown like heavily creamed coffee. Their hair was dark and straight, their features definitely Caucasian rather than negroid. Most startling of all, Holliday could see that some of the oddly dressed men had blue eyes.

“Umufo omhloshana,” Eddie said quietly.

Holliday nodded. “The Pale Strangers.”